Howlin: New data strategy ‘a major milestone’. So what’s it about?
"Data". It's a vague word signifying anything from the cost of your phone bill, to how many college places are available this year and for what points, to plain old mathematics.
Data allows us see more of the world around us, helping us to see things from unknown perspectives. Data distributed without restriction is "open data".
The new foundation document on the development of an Open Data Strategy was released, ironically enough, in the most unusable format possible - PDF. Disclosing documents as PDFs has long been how governments have reacted to Freedom Of Information requests. Largely undetectable by search engines, PDFs can neither be easily edited or converted into more pliable formats, leading to a recent World Bank report to conclude that the solution to all our problems may live in PDFs that nobody reads. In short, PDFs are where data goes to die.
Labelled as a strategy that strives to create "new opportunities for research, innovation, transparency, engagement and greater efficiency among businesses, researchers and citizens", Brendan Howlin's new open-data programme is making all the right sounds. Other planned implementations include:
The mandatory incorporation of all public bodies under one uniform data release programme - that means reports will be in the same format and released at similar frequency;
A focus on the release of environmental, health, transport, cultural and flood-related datasets.
A call for businesses to identify, develop and release beneficial data, if willing;
A vision for the research community to examine how and why open data can improve society.
The strategy also talks about implementing the five-star open data deployment standard where all future data will be released in an interactive HTML format or as linked data. It's an ambitious aim.
Envisaged by the creator of the World Wide Web, linked data has the potential to do for numbers what the web did for words, pictures and video. Local datasets will connect with global datasets, helping journalists, academics and the general public discover relationships and trends between otherwise unconnected things - revealing answers to complex societal, economic and environmental issues that would otherwise go unnoticed or unanswered.
It's a monumental leap, though one without a timeframe - wherein lies the ultimate concern. Even a cursory browse of data.gov.ie, the portal where all this data is set to be accessed, reveals much of the old-fashioned 'dirty' datasets and, as yet, none of the promised linked data.
Google has labelled the rise of open data as "the age of insight" - with open data we can describe reality better, allowing society to function with an ever increasing transparency and fluidity. This places an increased importance on Minister Howlin's open-data strategy.
Ireland lies a lowly 36th place in a Global Open Data Index. The US tops the list. While journalists in Britain and the US have utilized opendata over the last six years to contextualize everything from the socio-economic backgrounds of the 2011 London rioters, to aiding the evacuation effort of New York residents in advance of Hurricane Sandy, Ireland has yet to get off the start line.
Every dataset, however mundane, has an important truth lurking inside, and we've been collecting these data stories on every aspect of public life for decades.
Unlocking these databanks has the potential to revolutionise how we function as a society. Need to know how many patients are waiting for that hospital procedure you require? How much of that charitable donation went on worthy causes?
Well, the information is already out there - and if we get this data thing right, you'll be able to see it all.
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